11/22/63: A Novel (61 page)

“FIX HIM . . . WHAT HE’LL EAT! NO . . . SOURED . . . CREAM! NO . . . YOGRIT! HE’S . . . TOO . . . SKINNY!”

“Skeeny,” Marina said doubtfully. Safe in her mother’s arms, June’s weeping was winding down to watery hiccups.

“Yes!” Marguerite said. Then she whirled to Lee. “Fix that step!”

With that she left, only pausing to put a large smack on her granddaughter’s head. When she walked back toward the bus stop, she was smiling. She looked younger.

On the morning after Marguerite brought the playhouse, I was up at six. I went to the drawn drapes and peeked out through the crack without even thinking about it—spying on the house across the street had become a habit. Marina was sitting in one of the lawn chairs, smoking a cigarette. She was wearing pink rayon pajamas that were far too big for her. She had a new black eye, and there were spots of blood on the pajama shirt. She smoked slowly, inhaling deeply and staring out at nothing.

After awhile she went back inside and made breakfast. Pretty soon Lee came out and ate it. He didn’t look at her. He read a book.

That guy Gregory sent some coupons for the ShopRite,
Lee had told his mother, perhaps to explain the meat in the stew, maybe just to inform her that he and Marina weren’t alone and friendless in Fort Worth. That appeared to have passed unnoticed
by Mamochka, but it didn’t pass unnoticed by me. Peter Gregory was the first link in the chain that would lead George de Mohrenschildt to Mercedes Street.

Like de Mohrenschildt, Gregory was a Russian expat in the petroleum biz. He was originally from Siberia, and taught Russian one night a week at the Fort Worth Library. Lee discovered this and called for an appointment to ask if he, Lee, could possibly get work as a translator. Gregory gave him a test and found his Russian “passable.” What Gregory was really interested in—what
all
the expats were interested in, Lee must have felt—was the former Marina Prusakova, a young girl from Minsk who had somehow managed to escape the clutches of the Russian bear only to wind up in those of an American boor.

Lee didn’t get the job; Gregory hired Marina instead—to give his son Paul Russian lessons. It was money the Oswalds desperately needed. It was also something else for Lee to resent. She was tutoring a rich kid twice a week while he was stuck putting together screen doors.

The morning I observed Marina smoking on the porch, Paul Gregory, good-looking and about Marina’s age, pulled up in a brand-new Buick. He knocked, and Marina—wearing heavy makeup that made me think of Bobbi Jill—opened the door. Either mindful of Lee’s possessiveness or because of rules of propriety she had learned back home, she gave him his lesson on the porch. It lasted an hour and a half. June lay between them on her blanket, and when she cried, the two of them took turns holding her. It was a nice little scene, although Mr. Oswald would probably not have thought so.

Around noon, Paul’s father pulled up behind the Buick. There were two men and two women
with him. They brought groceries. The elder Gregory hugged his son, then kissed Marina on the cheek (the one that wasn’t swollen). There was a lot of talk in Russian. The younger Gregory was lost, but Marina was found: she lit up like a neon sign. She invited them in. Soon they were sitting in the living room, drinking iced tea and talking. Marina’s hands flew like excited birds. June went from hand to hand and lap to lap.

I was fascinated. The Russian émigré community had found the girl-woman who would become their darling. How could she be anything else? She was young, she was a stranger in a strange land, she was beautiful. Of course, beauty happened to be married to the beast—a surly young American who hit her (bad), and who believed passionately in a system these upper-middle-class folks had just as passionately rejected (far worse).

Yet Lee would accept their groceries with only occasional outbursts of temper, and when they came with furnishings—a new bed, a bright pink crib for the baby—he accepted these, too. He hoped the Russians would get him out of the hole he was in. But he didn’t like them, and by the time he moved his family to Dallas in November of ’62, he must have known his feelings were heartily reciprocated. Why
would
they like him, he must have thought. He was ideologically pure. They were cowards who had abandoned Mother Russia when she was on her knees in ’43, who had licked the Germans’ jackboots and then fled to the United States when the war was over, quickly embracing the American Way . . . which to Oswald meant saber-rattling, minority-oppressing, worker-exploiting crypto-fascism.

Some of this I knew from Al’s notes. Most of it I saw played out on the stage across the street, or deduced from the only important conversation my lamp-bug picked up and recorded.

On the evening of August twenty-fifth, a Saturday, Marina dolled up in a pretty blue dress and popped June
into a corduroy romper with appliquéd flowers on the front. Lee, looking sour, emerged from the bedroom in what had to be his only suit. It was a moderately hilarious wool box that could only have been made in Russia. It was a hot night, and I imagined he would be wringing with sweat before it was over. They walked carefully down the porch steps (the bad one still hadn’t been fixed) and set off for the bus stop. I got into my car and drove up to the corner of Mercedes Street and Winscott Road. I could see them standing by the telephone pole with its white-painted stripe, arguing. Big surprise there. The bus came. The Oswalds got on. I followed, just as I had followed Frank Dunning in Derry.

History repeats itself
is another way of saying the past harmonizes.

They got off the bus in a residential neighborhood on the north side of Dallas. I parked and watched them walk down to a small but handsome fieldstone-and-timber Tudor house. The carriage lamps at the end of the walk glowed softly in the dusk. There was no crabgrass on
this
lawn. Everything about the place shouted
America works!
Marina led the way to the house with the baby in her arms, Lee lagging slightly behind, looking lost in his double-breasted jacket, which swung almost to the backs of his knees.

Marina pushed Lee in front of her and pointed at the bell. He rang it. Peter Gregory and his son came out, and when June put her arms out to Paul, the young man laughed and took her. Lee’s mouth twitched downward when he saw this.

Another man came out. I recognized him from the group that had arrived on the day of Paul Gregory’s first language lesson, and he had been back to the Oswald place three or four times since, bringing groceries, toys for June, or both. I was pretty sure his name was George Bouhe (yes, another George, the past harmonizes in all sorts of ways), and although he was pushing sixty, I had an idea he was seriously crushing on Marina.

According to the short-order
cook who’d gotten me into this, Bouhe was the one who persuaded Peter Gregory to throw the get-acquainted party. George de Mohrenschildt wasn’t there, but he’d hear about it shortly thereafter. Bouhe would tell de Mohrenschildt about the Oswalds and their peculiar marriage. He would also tell de Mohrenschildt that Lee Oswald had made a scene at the party, praising socialism and the Russian collectives.
The young man strikes me as crazy,
Bouhe would say. De Mohrenschildt, a lifelong connoisseur of crazy, would decide he had to meet this odd couple for himself.

Why did Oswald blow his top at Peter Gregory’s party, offending the well-meaning expats who might otherwise have helped him? I didn’t know for sure, but I had a pretty good idea. There’s Marina, charming them all (especially the men) in her blue dress. There’s June, pretty as a Woolworth’s baby picture in her charity jumper with the sewn-on flowers. And there’s Lee, sweating in his ugly suit. He’s keeping up with the rapid ebb and flow of Russian better than young Paul Gregory, but in the end, he’s still left behind. It must have infuriated him to have to kowtow to these people, and to eat their salt. I hope it did. I hope it hurt.

I didn’t linger. What I cared about was de Mohrenschildt, the next link in the chain. He would arrive onstage soon. Meanwhile, all three Oswalds were finally out of 2703, and would be until at least ten o’clock. Given that the following day was Sunday, maybe even later.

I drove back to activate the bug in their living room.

Mercedes Street was partying hearty that Saturday night, but the field behind
chez
Oswald was silent and deserted. I thought my key would work on the back door as well as the front, but that was a theory I never had to test, because the back door was unlocked. During my time in Fort Worth, I never once used the key I’d purchased from Ivy Templeton. Life is full of ironies.

The place was heartbreakingly
neat. The high chair had been placed between the parents’ seats at the little table in the kitchen where they took their meals, the tray wiped gleaming-clean. The same was true of the peeling surface of the counter and the sink with its rusty hard-water ring. I made a bet with myself that Marina would have left Rosette’s jumper-clad girls and went into what was now June’s room to check. I had brought a penlight and shined it around the walls. Yes, they were still there, although in the dark they were more ghostly than cheerful. June probably looked at them as she lay in her crib, sucking her bokkie. I wondered if she would remember them later, on some deep level of her mind. Crayola ghost-girls.

Jimla,
I thought for no reason at all, and shivered.

I moved the bureau, attached the tapwire to the lamp’s plug, and fed it through the hole I’d drilled in the wall. All fine, but then I had a bad moment. Very bad. When I moved the bureau back into place, it bumped against the wall and the Leaning Lamp of Pisa toppled.

If I’d had time to think, I would have frozen in place and the damn thing would have shattered on the floor. Then what? Remove the bug and leave the pieces? Hope they’d accept the idea that the lamp, unsteady to begin with, had fallen on its own? Most people would buy that, but most people don’t have reason to be paranoid about the FBI. Lee might find the hole I’d drilled in the wall. If he did, the butterfly would spread its wings.

But I didn’t have time to think. I reached out and caught the lamp on the way down. Then I just stood there, holding it and shaking. It was hot as an oven in the little house, and I could smell the stink of my own sweat. Would
they
smell it when they came back? How could they not?

I wondered if I were mad. Surely the smart thing would be to remove the bug . . . and then remove myself. I could reconnect with Oswald on April tenth of next year, watch him try to assassinate General Edwin Walker, and if he was on his own, I could then kill him just as I had Frank Dunning. KISS, as they say in Christy’s AA meetings; keep it simple, stupid. Why in God’s
name was I fucking with a bugged thriftshop lamp when the future of the world was at stake?

It was Al Templeton who answered.
You’re here because the window of uncertainty is still open. You’re here because if George de Mohrenschildt is more than he appears, then maybe Oswald wasn’t the one. You’re here to save Kennedy, and making sure starts now. So put that fucking lamp back where it belongs.

I put the lamp back where it belonged, although its unsteadiness worried me. What if Lee knocked it off the bureau himself, and saw the bug inside when the ceramic base shattered? For that matter, what if Lee and de Mohrenschildt conversed in this room, but with the lamp off and in tones too low for my long-distance mike to pick up? Then it all would have been for nothing.

You’ll never make an omelet thinking that way, buddy.

What convinced me was the thought of Sadie. I loved her and she loved me—at least she had—and I’d thrown that away to come here to this shitty street. And by Christ, I wasn’t going to leave without at least trying to hear what George de Mohrenschildt had to say for himself.

I slipped through the back door, and with the penlight clamped in my teeth, connected the tapwire to the tape recorder. I slid the recorder into a rusty Crisco can to protect it from the elements, then concealed it in the little nest of bricks and boards I had already prepared.

Then I went back to my own shitty little house on that shitty little street and began to wait.

They never used the lamp until it got almost too dark to see. Saving on the electricity bill, I suppose. Besides, Lee was a workingman. He went to bed early, and she went when he did. The first time I checked the tape, what I had was mostly Russian—and draggy Russian at that, given
the super-slow speed of the recorder. If Marina tried out her English vocabulary, Lee would reprimand her. Nevertheless, he sometimes spoke to June in English if the baby was fussy, always in low, soothing tones. Sometimes he even sang to her. The super-slow recordings made him sound like an orc trying its hand at “Rockabye, Baby.”

Twice I heard him hit Marina, and the second time, Russian wasn’t good enough to express his rage. “You worthless, nagging cunt! I guess maybe my ma was right about you!” This was followed by the slam of a door, and the sound of Marina crying. It cut out abruptly as she turned off the lamp.

On the evening of September fourth, I saw a kid, thirteen or so, come to the Oswalds’ door with a canvas sack over his shoulder. Lee, barefoot and dressed in a tee-shirt and jeans, opened up. They spoke. Lee invited him inside. They spoke some more. At one point Lee picked up a book and showed it to the kid, who looked at it dubiously. There was no chance of using the directional mike, because the weather had turned cool and the windows over there were shut. But the Leaning Lamp of Pisa was on, and when I retrieved the second tape late the following night, I was treated to an amusing conversation. By the third time I played it, I hardly heard the slow drag of the voices.

The kid was selling subscriptions to a newspaper—or maybe it was a magazine—called
Grit.
He informed the Oswalds that it had all sorts of interesting stuff the New York papers couldn’t be bothered with (he labeled this “country news”), plus sports and gardening tips. It also had what he called “fiction stories” and comic strips. “You won’t get
Dixie Dugan
in the
Times Herald,
” he informed them. “My mama loves Dixie.”